The Making of Christian Malta: From the Early Middle Ages to 1530 (review)

Dr. Anthony T. Luttrell has over the past forty-odd years given an outstanding contribution to the study of the medieval past of the Maltese Islands. The rigors of his inquisitively analytical study of the written and unwritten evidence have been a major driving force in the demythologizing process of a seminally important period in the history of the small Central Mediterranean archipelago. Together with, but independently of, the Maltese medieval specialist, Godfrey Wettinger, he has in this way been responsible for the opening of new approaches that have been pursued and consolidated by the research of other academics, among them Stanley Fiorini, Charles Dalli, and the present reviewer. The great breakthrough came in 1975 when he edited for the British School at Rome a book of collected essays by an international team of scholars, Medieval Malta—Studies on Malta before the Knights, to which he contributed the introductory and most substantial study, that was subsequently published separately as Approaches to Medieval Malta. It is also reproduced as the second essay in the collection of studies under review.

Strategically located at the cultural crossroads of Christian South Europe and Muslim North Africa, the Maltese Islands have played a role in history disproportionate to their physical limitations of space and natural resources. International scholarly attention has focused largely on the Knights of St. John, who ruled them between 1530 and 1798, and, to a lesser extent, on their subsequent role as the most important British naval base on route to the Middle East and India. Their interest as a microcosm of the social, economic, religious, and linguistic realities, that shaped the emergence of a multifaceted Central Mediterranean identity in the millennium between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the dawn of the modern age was largely ignored. It is in this regard that the true significance of Anthony Luttrell is best appreciated.

Luttrell's first interest in Malta were the archives of the Knights of St. John, particularly those relating to their origin and early history. His introduction to the Maltese Middle Ages came through Professor Lionel Butler, a Fellow of All Souls and principal of Royal Holloway College, who in 1962 delivered a brilliant series of lectures on the subject at the British Council in Valletta, that unfortunately remained unpublished and he passed away tragically in 1982.

Luttrell's meticulously researched studies on Malta are scattered in an impressive number of specialized books and learned journals, foremost among them the Papers of the British School at Rome, and Melita Historica, the annual publication of the Malta Historical Society. The merit of the book under review is to gather in a manageable and easily accessible volume some of his more significant contributions. There are some notable omissions, such as the seminally important "Girolamo Manduca and Gian Francesco Abela: Tradition and Invention in Maltese Historiograpy" (Melita Historica, vol. VII/2, 1977) which puts in a meaningful political context the distortions and fabrications that since the seventeenth century fueled the myth of a Maltese national identity rooted in an uninterrupted Christian and Latin tradition, but the choice is otherwise admirably comprehensive.

The first essay, contrary to the twenty other studies in the volume, is being published for the first time; it has a special interest. Called "Medieval Malta: Approaches and Reproaches," it puts under the lens the research and publications that have in Luttrell's own words "revolutionised medieval Malta" since the publication of his benchmarking volume of essays in 1975. Most of this revolution he himself engineered, thus ensuring an outstanding and lasting contribution to Maltese historiography.